At the ISTE Education Technology Conference held in Philadelphia, USA recently, Google said that they will add a new "image-to-text" conversion tool to the Chrome browser, which is mainly an accessibility feature for users who rely on screen readers, but This feature can also benefit ordinary users.
According to an internal Google analysis, there are currently more than 360 billion PDF files that are difficult to view for users who are blind or have low vision and rely on readers.
For the past 30 years, we've pushed hard for web developers and content creation tools to make their products accessible, but the reality is that many PDFs are still not viewable.
The new "image-to-text" conversion tool is essentially an OCR tool that can extract the text content from a PDF and convert the images in the PDF into a machine-readable format. The extracted text can then be read aloud by the browser's built-in screen reader.
Google says the "image-to-text" conversion tool will initially only be available in the Chrome browser on chromeOS, but will roll out to all Chrome-enabled computers in the coming months.